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Does Low Fertility Rate Have Ethical Dimensions? Trivent Publishing © The Authors, 2016 Available online at http://trivent-publishing.eu/ Series: Philosophy, Communication, Media Sciences Volume: Communication Today: An Overview from Online Journalism to Applied Philosophy Does Low Fertility Rate Have Ethical Dimensions? János I. Tóth Department of Philosophy, University of Szeged, Hungary [email protected] Abstract The man's position in the world is constantly changing and morality should also change simultaneously. Applied ethics could help the moral evaluation of new technology, customs or the social phenomenon. According to the public opinion of the western world, a decision about having children is an essentially private one. A new problem appeared: the very low fertility rate, which is characteristic for a number of countries in Europe and East Asia. This demographic crisis obligatory leads to ageing and population decline ceteris paribus. Therefore, the question arises whether there is a need for re-evaluating this problem from moral point of view. Keywords Applied ethics; conscious and responsible reproduction; rule-utilitarianism; Hans Jonas This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY- NC-ND 4.0) license, which permits others to copy or share the article, provided original work is properly cited and that this is not done for commercial purposes. Users may not remix, transform, or build upon the material and may not distribute the modified material (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) János I. Tóth 286 Does Low Fertility Rate Have Ethical Dimensions? I. The changing world and the applied ethics Man's position in the world is constantly changing and morality should also change simultaneously.1 Initially, moral changes were very slow. For traditional communities, changes are impossible to observe, so they feel entitled to consider that the moral standing and moral rules are chiselled in stone. Starting from the Renaissance, moral changes have accelerated in the Western world. Changes are taking place on two levels: on the one hand, changes of the specific moral rules, on the other hand, changes of the guiding principles and moral values. For example, cruelty to animals (or animal abuse) is not morally acceptable today, but it was in the past. Table 1 provides some additional examples for new rules and moral principles. Table 1. Some examples of new rules and moral principles to appear. New moral rules New moral values Representative books and principles Protection of individual Freedom, autonomy Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s freedom Cabin 1852; J.S. Mill: On Liberty 1859; Sexual revolution Sexual liberation Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron, 1470; Sigmund Freud: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905; D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s lover 1928; Women’s rights Feminism Virginia Woolf: Three Guineas 1938; Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex 1949; Animal welfare Animals have intrinsic Peter Singer: Animal liberation 1975; value Using of renewable Sustainability Our Common Future (Brundtland Report) resources; 1987; There may be situations where these principles collide with each other. In my opinion, fertility is an issue which may present conflict between individual freedom and sustainability. I do not think it is the correct solution to ignore one of the fundamental values, but we could look for a moral compromise between these contradictory values. The applied ethics has an important role in changing ethics. It could help the moral evaluation of new technology, customs or social phenomenon. Applied ethics is a philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment. It attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life. In conclusion the applied ethics should reflect the results of sciences and develop ethical position; furthermore it should explore the moral principles. Science examines issues objectively, using descriptive statement about what “is”. Questions referring to “is" are objective and therefore the scientific debate can be finished relatively easily. However, in ethics including applied ethics the task is more difficult, that is, we should add moral values and ratings (good, bad, right wrong) to these special situations. Unlike Hume, the applied ethics frequently tries to derive “ought” from “is.”2 So, the concept of “Hume’s laws” should be rejected. Unfortunately, the questions of “ought to be” which inherently have subjective nature can be debated continuously and almost endlessly. Generally, the applied ethics investigates the new social phenomenon on utilitarian bases. According to this human behaviour and practice which causes more disadvantages than advantages for 1 Paul Bloom, “How do morals change?” in Nature Vol. 464, 490 (25 March 2010). online doi: 10.1038/464490a. 2 David Hume, A Treatise of human Nature (London: NuVision Publications, 2007), 335. János I. Tóth 287 Does Low Fertility Rate Have Ethical Dimensions? those affected is morally wrong. The utilitarian judging of individual behaviour is always difficult. The rule-utilitarianism examines the rule and not the individual act from a utilitarian point of view. Let us take the use of DDT for example. Since Carson's time (1962) we know that the use of DDT causes very serious ecological and human damages.3 Afterwards, the use of DDT was rejected by the human community because natural and social disadvantages outweigh the advantages. In this case the individual and short-term benefits collide with the collective and long-term disadvantages. The sustainability issues are also characterized by the collision of short-term benefits and long-term disadvantages. One of the important features of sustainability ethics is that it examines the long-term effects of human behaviour. So the human behaviour, which is harmful in the long run and is unsustainable, is usually unacceptable from the moral point of view. At the same time there may be exceptions. For example, there may be such aspects of human rights in the case of which the community would rather take a long-term disadvantage. Finally, I would like to underline that new moral rules are not always accompanied by bureaucratic regulations. For example, selective collection of waste is generally recognized as moral behaviour, but it is not associated with bureaucratic coercion. II. A new problem: low fertility rate There appeared a new problem, that is low fertility rate, which is characteristic for a number of countries in the developed world. Many people would be surprised to know that over the past three decades, fertility rates have plummeted in many parts of the world, including China, Japan and even significant regions of India. These Asian giants are not alone. In much of Europe, East Asia and elsewhere, the average number of children born has fallen to unprecedentedly low levels. Like other facets of globalization, low fertility rates are by no means universal: high fertility persists in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, but elsewhere low fertility is more the rule than the exception. These underlying trends in childbearing mean that in the near future the rate of population growth both in Europe and Asia are likely to decline. Thirty years ago only a small fraction of the world’s population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below the “replacement level.” Nowadays roughly 60 percent of the world’s population are living in countries with below-replacement fertility rates.4 We can read about the concept of “underpopulation bomb.”5 As Folbre (2013) writes „The birth dearth/empty cradle/baby bust is upon us, threatening consequences just as dire as the overpopulation bomb that Paul Ehrlich predicted would cause mass global starvation in the 1970s. … This dire prophecy of underpopulation has gradually made its way from the pages of Foreign Policy to The New York Times and, most recently, The Wall Street Journal.”6 I am going to use the concept of overpopulation and underpopulation from demographic point of view, that is, these concepts only refer to the rapid population growth and decline. The concept of “underpopulation bomb” suggests that this process is bad and demolishing therefore it is unacceptable by morality. So the empirical question is: can we use this term correctly or not? This study examines whether there are ethical implications of low fertility rate. The essence of this phenomenon is that the statistical average of newborn children is not sufficient for the replacement fertility rates. III. Demographical considerations In 1950 only 2.5 billion people lived on the Earth, and this number doubled in less than 40 years. The number of people reached 7 billion in 2011 and according to the predictions this number will reach 10 3 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, Mariner Books, 1962/2002), chapter 3, pp. 15-37. 4 Michael S. Teitelbaum, Michael S Winter, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty. (Yale University Press, 2013). 1-39. 5 K. Kelly, “What “should” we be worried about? The Underpopulation Bomb.” in Edge.org 2013 https://edge.org/response-detail/23722 (accessed December 11, 2015). 6 F. Nancy, “The Underpopulation Bomb.” The New York Times. Economix. February 11, 2013. 6:00 AM http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/the-underpopulation-bomb/ (accessed December 11, 2015). János I. Tóth 288 Does Low Fertility Rate Have Ethical Dimensions? billion in 2083.7 During this period the fertility rate significantly decreased. A statistical average woman had almost 5 children in the fifties, while this value decreased to 3 children in the nineties. The decrease of fertility rate corresponds to the final phase of the demographic transition. Demography is a scientific study of human population including the changes in population size. The components of change of the total population are birth, death and migrations.
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